Found 23 article(s) for author 'David Cutler'

Attributing Medical Spending to Conditions: A Comparison of Methods. David Cutler, November 2018, Paper, “Partitioning medical spending into conditions is essential to understanding the cost burden of medical care. Two broad strategies have been used to measure disease-specific spending. The first attributes each medical claim to the condition listed as its cause. The second decomposes total spending for a person over a year to the cumulative set of conditions they have. Traditionally, this has been done through regression analysis. This paper makes two contributions. First, we develop a new method to attribute spending to conditions using propensity score models. Second, we compare the claims attribution approach to the regression approach and our propensity score stratification method in a common set of beneficiaries age 65 and over drawn from the 2009 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. Our estimates show that the three methods have important differences in spending allocation and that the propensity score model likely offers the best theoretical and empirical combination.” Link

A Breath of Bad Air: Cost of the Trump Environmental Agenda May Lead to 80 000 Extra Deaths per Decade. David Cutler, Francesca Dominici, June 12, 2018, Paper, “President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt have pledged to reexamine landmark environmental policies and to repeal regulations. In their view, excessive regulations are harming US industry, and thus reducing regulation will be good for business. As Donald Trump has said, seemingly without irony, “We are going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us. You can’t breathe—you cannot breathe.”” Link

The Good and Bad News of Health Care Employment. David Cutler, February 27, 2018, Paper, “Health care has long been one of the bright spots in the US employment situation. As people have moved out of manufacturing, health care has been a prominent landing place. Just this year, health care passed retail trade to become the largest employer in the economy. Furthermore, health care is a relatively stable industry. Because demand for care remains relatively constant across recessions and expansions, health care employment declines less in recessions than does employment in other industries.” Link

What Is The US Health Spending Problem? David Cutler, February 14, 2018, Paper, “Is increased spending on medical care harmful to the US economy? The overall share of the gross domestic product spent on medical care is not a problem, provided that the services bought are worth more than their cost. However, high and rising costs expose two often-overlooked problems. First, spending is too high because many dollars are wasted. Estimates suggest that unnecessary medical spending costs the typical American family thousands of dollars each year.” Link

Rising Medical Costs Mean More Rough Times Ahead. David Cutler, August 8, 2017, Opinion, “Medical costs are rising again, after recent years of historic lows. As the figure shows, growth rates of real per person medical spending in the past 3 years have averaged 3.4% annually, up from 0.9% in 2011 to 2013. Although the current growth rate is low in a historical context, it exceeds the economy’s growth as a whole. Thus, health costs are expected to reappear on the radar screen of governments, businesses, and households.” Link

Assesses the Political Odds of Drug Pricing Reform. David Cutler, July 25, 2017, Video, “Legislators from both parties may have difficulty finding a common solution to high drug prices, but President Donald Trump could be instrumental in bringing prices down if he acts on his pledges, according to David M. Cutler, PhD, of Harvard University.” Link

Trump Administration’s Attention Not on Value-Based Purchasing. David Cutler, May 23, 2017, Video, “The Trump administration’s healthcare priorities have mainly focused on replacing the Affordable Care Act or reforming Medicaid, leading to concerns that value-based purchasing efforts will be left in the dust, said David M. Cutler, PhD, of Harvard University.” Link

Health and Taxes. David Cutler, October 25, 2016, Paper, “Viewing health care through the lens of a social issue prompts such questions as: What policies would best improve the population’s health? How can report cards be used to improve the quality of surgery? Where are there opportunities for additional disease prevention? The questions here are intricate and detailed. Some of the issues are clinical, and advice from physicians is actively sought and welcomed. For example, no one would develop a pay-for-performance system for surgeons without extensive involvement of the relevant surgical societies.” Link

Economic Approaches to Estimating Benefits of Regulations Affecting Addictive Goods. David Cutler, December 2, 2015, Paper. “The question of how to evaluate lost consumer surplus in benefit−cost analyses has been contentious. There are clear health benefits of regulations that curb consumption of goods with health risks, such as tobacco products and foods high in fats, calories, sugar, and sodium. Yet, if regulations cause consumers to give up goods they like, the health benefits they experience may be offset by some utility loss, which benefit−cost analyses of regulations need to take into account. This paper lays out the complications of measuring benefits of regulations aiming to curb consumption of addictive and habitual goods, rooted in the fact that consumers’ observed demand for such goods may not be in line with their true preferences. Focusing on the important case of tobacco products, the paper describes four possible approaches for estimating benefits when consumers’ preferences may not be aligned with their behavior, and identifies one as having the best feasibility for use in applied benefit−cost analyses in the near term.” Link

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